Samsung hands out prototype Tizen handsets to developers

Those in attendance at the Tizen developer’s conference in San Francisco are being given Samsung prototype devices loaded with version 1.0 of the budding operating system. The crew from The Handheld Blog was in attendance and has plenty to share on the subject.

The Samsung handset in question features a 4.65-inch Super AMOLED screen, a Cortex A9 1.2GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, an 8MP rear camera and a 2MP front shooter. There’s also a micro-USB port, WiFI, GPS, NFC and a standard audio / video decoder.

The OS borrows heavily from Samsung’s TouchWiz UI with a pull-down notification system and support for tethering right out of the box. Additionally there is integrated Facebook, Google and Twitter account support which will make it easier to sync contacts with the various social networks.

The author notes several times that this is essentially a barebones version of the operating system that doesn’t represent what the final version will look like. New features and performance tweaks are all but guaranteed before the OS is ready to launch.

If you are unfamiliar with Tizen, it’s a joint effort operating system being developed by Intel and Samsung. The platform is open-source and based on Linux with a heavy focus on HTML5 and other web standards. Tizen uses elements from MeeGo, a failed OS that was a combination of Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo. MeeGo was officially discontinued in September 2011 in favor of Tizen.